GIF Coder for Swift

A lightweight LZW encoder and decoder for animated GIFs written in pure Swift, thus running on any platform, including Linux.

Example

// Create a new GIF
var gif = GIF(width: 300, height: 300)

// Add some frames for the animation
for i in 0..<20 {
    let image = try CairoImage(pngFilePath: "frame\(i).png")
    gif.frames.append(.init(image: image, delayTime: 100))
}

// Encode the GIF to a byte buffer
let data = try gif.encoded()

Technical Details

GIF encoding is more computationally intensive than decoding. It can become a bottleneck when GIF is used as a video codec and serialization must happen in real-time. Therefore, multicore CPU is used to accelerate the encoding of animated GIFs. All the animation frames are gathered into one Array, which is then divided among all CPU cores in the system.

System Dependencies

• Swift 5.10+
• Cairo, see swift-graphics